International industry consortium opens its first African conference on low cost, high quality service operations

Morristown, NJ – July 7th, 2008 – TM Forum, the world’s largest trade association focused on managing communications and media services, will host Management World Africa (Johannesburg, July 14-17 2008)  to focus on challenges facing the rapidly expanding African communications market.

The TM Forum pools the expertise of over 700 service providers and suppliers from 75 countries to share best practices on creating and delivering new services. With the rapid growth of communications services in Africa, service provider experiences from other parts of the world who have already cut costs in their infrastructure and service rollouts, will be of significant interest to African operators. 

The conference will bring together both local and global service providers including Telkom SA, Botswana Telecom, Vodacom, Orange, BT and Korea Telecom to discuss the complex operational issues that face markets experiencing dramatic growth. Getting operational issues right is the key to success and staying profitable in markets where the cost of communications continues to fall.

Martin Creaner, TM Forum President and CTO, said today “Africa is an important emerging market for TM Forum and our members, facing many unique challenges, as well as common pressures we see in other parts of the world. Management World Africa provides a platform for us to learn from African operators and bring them together with their international counterparts.”

With 27 new operators added in three years and minimal legacy communications infrastructure, African operators have the opportunity to rapidly deploy low-cost services and achieve business success by adopting the latest architectures and technology. Key to their success will be adoption of TM Forum best practices and standards including TM Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM), to be showcased at the event through case studies from companies including Saudi Telecom, Telkom SA and Vodacom.

Several challenges facing the African market – such as the lack of wide-scale wireline infrastructure – are to be tackled as part of the two-day Management World interactive conference, including topics such as  WiMAX, in a case study from Korea Telecom. PricewaterhouseCoopers will be presenting a study of issues affecting revenue value chain across more than 20 African suppliers.

TM Forum’s Management World events offer a unique combination of impartial speakers, networking and education opportunities for attendees. Management World Africa will take place between the 14th and 17th of July 2008 at the Hilton Sandton Hotel, Johannesburg, South Africa, and is expected to attract more than 150 attendees. For more information please visit www.tmforum.org/africa

Further information is available from Monica Meyer on (011) 792 4706 or [email protected].